This chapter examines how the peasants who were discontented with the state policies, taxes, monopolies, local exploitation and oppression expressed their criticism and made their voices heard through letters to the press, petitions to official authorities, placards, rumors and folk culture. It traces the peasants’ complaints about agricultural prices, agricultural loans, interest rates, landlessness, taxes, monopolies, enclosure of forests and grazing lands, bureaucratic malfeasance, exploitation and oppression by large landowners, village headmen and gendarmes. It also evaluates how popular demands and complaints influenced the state’s decision-making.

This chapter deals with the struggles of urban laborers to reappropriate their overexploited labor in everyday life. The historical studies on working-class politics during the early republic focused on the organizational, ideological working-class movements, strikes and open protests, mostly by industrial workers. Therefore, what happened in everyday life and in other segments of the working class has been ignored. This chapter reveals the forms of laborers’ struggles to seek their rights, to minimize their losses and to maximize their gains. Their ways to struggle varied from petitioning, suing and changing jobs to violating workplace rules by slowing down on the job, working perfunctorily, reducing work productivity and engaging in workplace theft. This chapter shows how the artisans, as the most neglected group in the republican working-class history, instead of submitting to the industry and importation, struggled for survival. Moreover, it also shows how all of these small and daily behaviors led to bigger consequences, which alarmed both employers and the government, causing them to consider social measures to ensure a stable and productive working class.

This chapter describes the theoretical argument in detail. It starts by discussing relevant features of civil wars, as well as scope conditions for an analysis of the Syrian civil war. Then, it discusses how civilian behavior during conflict is influenced by threat perceptions. Survival strategies are responses to threat perceptions specifically. Violent experiences in particular drive threat perceptions. These experiences are particularly likely when civilians have social proximity to perpetrators of violence. After that, it reviews existing understandings of PTSD and PTG. To connect these psychological processes to behavior, the chapter then turns to narratives and narrative ruptures. Next, it addresses how people develop opportunity to act safely. Finally, it shows how motivation and opportunity combine in order to allow civilians to select specific survival strategies.

The Introduction provides an overview of the theoretical argument and discusses the importance of the book as a whole. It opens with motivation for the book. Then, it introduces the crucial concepts of threat perceptions and repertoires of survival strategies. It then introduces the main source of evidence for the book, interviews with Syrian refugees in Jordan and Turkey. After that, it provides an overview of the book's theoretical and policy implications. Finally, it provides a road map for the book.

The conclusion draws together the main themes from the book as a whole. It highlights the multitude of experiences behind bars, gendered differences in the structure and experiences of prisons, and changes in practice and policies over time. It emphasises women’s agency and survival strategies both during incarceration and on the outside. This conclusion also draws attention to the insights offered on women’s relationships with each other and with their wider families and their roles as mothers, daughters, sisters and wives or partners. The conclusion also reminds us that women established and maintained positive and negative relationships with the staff charged to manage them.

Chapter 1 explores how middle-class ideas about ‘civilising’ the masses and moulding women into responsible citizens influenced prison practices. It examines key aspects of a day in the Irish female convict prison. It first examines the classification system, established after transportation ended in 1853, through which convict women progressed. The second section outlines how the penal system sought to reform through schooling, religious instruction and practice, and work, while the third considers order and discipline. The chapter seeks to offer a glimpse of how inmates’ individual preferences, needs and demands could disrupt the structured prison regime. It demonstrates that many convicted women in Ireland deliberately and inadvertently thwarted attempts to impose uniformity and regulation.